Rosa Bonheur
1822-1899
Rosa Bonheur was one of the most famous painters and sculptors of the 19 th century, receiving both critical and public acclaim for painting in the style known as the “juste milieu” , a middle ground that managed to combine the innovations of the Barbizon painters with more traditional genre and landscape conventions.
Rosalie, to be known as Rosa Bonheur, was born in Bordeaux on March 16, 1822 . Her father, Raimond, was a minor artist and drawing master and her mother a member of the minor gentility. After the July Revolution of 1830, Raimond moved the family to Paris , and then left them in order to participate in a monastic socialist utopian group. His wife Sophie gave music lessons during the day and sewed piecework at night in order to support herself and their 4 children. Rosa Bonheur was only eleven when her mother died.
Fortunately for the family, Rosa 's paintings began selling almost immediately. In 1840, when still only nineteen, she had two works accepted for the Salon. From then until 1855, she was to have work in the Salon every year. Impressed with the growing popularity of animal paintings and sculpture, she began to study natural history and comparative anatomy in order to render them more convincingly. Most of her early work was based on a small menagerie her father allowed her to keep in their sixth floor apartment. Though she only wore masculine apparel when working, that, combined with her cigarette smoking and riding astride, made her subject to speculation. An advocate of the writings of the feminist Flora Tristan (Paul Gauguin's grandmother), she believed in women's right to self-determination, using her career as an explanation for avoiding marriage:
Art is an absorbent, - a tyrant. It demands heart, brain, soul, body, the entireness of its votary. Nothing less will win its highest favor. I wed art. It is my husband – my world – my life dream – the air I breathe. I know nothing else – feel nothing else -think nothing else. My soul finds in it the most complete satisfaction. I married art . . . What could I do with any other husband? |
By 1848, all of the Bonheur family except the young Juliette, who made her debut in 1852, were exhibiting in the Paris Salon. That year Rosa received a gold medal and a 3,000 franc commission from the French government to produce a painting on the subject of ploughing. The result became one of her best-known and reproduced paintings, “Ploughing in the Nivernais ”. Her father's death in 1849 freed her to establish her own household. She purchased a new studio and invited her long-time companion Nathalie Micas and Nathalie's mother to join her.
In 1852, she launched her masterpiece, “The Horse Fair”; it was a sensation at the Salon of 1853 and the lithographic reproduction sold phenomenally, not only in France , but also in England and the United States . At the Exposition Universelle of 1855, Bonheur won a gold medal for “Haymaking in the Auvergne ”. In response to her international success, she undertook a tour of England where an admiring press referred to her as “the French Landseer”.
During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the irrepressible Bonheur attempted to get the mayor of By to allow her to organize a militia to fight the Germans; though he denied her a command, she shouldered her gun and drilled with the other men in the area until the Prussians took over the area and billeted several officers at the Chateau. Even then, her international reputation was such that Prince Friedrich of Prussia provided a safe conduct for her and ordered that the Chateau was not to be harmed.
Rosa remained popular to the end of her days. After her death from pneumonia in 1899, a road through her beloved Forest of Fontainebleau was named after her, and her surviving brother Isidore and her brother-in-law/stepbrother sculpted a bull that stood in the forest as a memorial to her.
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